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Comment by m0zg | Hacker News Reader

This was clear right from the outset too. Upper middle class white people in "nice" neighborhoods don't even interact with police.

I interacted with a police officer a grand total of 3 times in the last 20 years: one traffic citation, one traffic ticket (missing front plate on the car - deserved), and an officer stopped by after someone broke into our mailbox and asked if I'd press charges (I said I would, but they never found the perp).

Compare that to a bad neighborhood in e.g. Chicago or Detroit where the situation is worse than in Kabul, and without constant, heavy, aggressive police presence a lot more people will be murdered.

The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient in e.g. Chicago is what someone has astutely called a "luxury belief", a modern equivalent of "let them eat cake". It comes from the tower so ivory, you can't look at it without hurting your eyes in broad daylight.

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> The belief that we do not need police and that a "social worker" is sufficient

I think most people still believe that we need some policing. But that policing isn't solving the longer term problems. We know that sending people to prison has a tendency to turn people into criminals even if their original crime was minor (not everyone of course). So why is that our strategy for dealing for crime rather than tackling the underlying social and economic issues? There's good reason to think that crime levels would be reduced if half the police budget was put into social programs (specifically in the US where police budgets are ridiculous).

While social workers might be useful in Detroit, we are unlike Chicago in that we don't have a very heavy handed PD, but also one with significantly less funding and man power - we could use more funding to improve our abysmal response times in many neighborhoods.

However Detroit's PD still has bad cops even if they are miles ahead of other police departments, even though we could use more police in general - I don't think more "heavy handedness" or "aggressiveness" is useful or desired.

But that's not what you're going to get, folks. Now you're going to get half as many officers, and "social workers" trying to talk sense into armed meth heads. Good luck. All because upper middle class white youth has never interacted with a police officer and thinks you don't need them. Note also that I didn't say "heavy handed". I said "heavy", meaning visible presence, patrols, monitoring.

Detroit had 4 mass shootings in July. I don't agree.

Yes, one of them happened very close to my childhood from home, but I don't understand where there's a disagreement.

It should be noted that aggressive policing - distinct from increased police presence - has been shown to contribute to violent/major crimes rather than decrease it: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0211-5

Significant community trust has been built by police in Detroit by keeping their limited resources focused on what helps prevent violence rather than broken windows policing - I believe the community would agree and the police leadership here have voiced support for this as well.

When you define the police you get less police presence or police with less training budget.

There just isn't any good news to either the a abolitionists or the motte and Bailey argument of "we don't mean completely" argument to the future of policing or society. Violent rioters are demanding we defund our defenses against violent rioters.

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